Events Archive

Amitav Ghosh Fall 2020 Seminar: “The Arts of Living in a Precarious Age” (with Anand Pandian)

November 13, 2020

For more information, e-mail Bruce Holsinger (bwholsinger@gmail.com)

As the impact of climate change intensifies, it is becoming increasingly clear that the Indian Ocean region, with its fast-accelerating economies, its innumerable oil and gas producers, its collapsing ecosystems, its vulnerable yet rapidly-increasing populations, and its swiftly-expanding carbon footprint, will be the theatre in which the future of the world will be decided. How will the ongoing changes affect the material and cultural lives of the region’s peoples, who are simultaneously drivers and victims of climate change? Many of the world’s major zones of conflict are already clustered around the Indian Ocean, and the region is also the theater of many accelerating arms races. How will these developments affect the global balance of power? What lessons might past climatic shifts offer for the future? These are some of the issues that will be discussed over the four two-hour sessions of this workshop. 

November 13: The Arts of Living in a Precarious Age

With guest speaker: Anand Pandian (Johns Hopkins)

• Anand Pandian, Introduction to A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times, Duke UP, 2019.
• Nils Bubandt, “Haunted Geologies: Spirits, Stones and the Necropolitics of the Anthropocene,” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, eds. Anne Tsing, et.al. University of Minnesota Press, 2017
• Wu Ming-Yi, excerpts from the novel, The Man with the Compound Eyes, Taiwan: Summer Festival Press, 2011.
• Jason Decaires Taylor, underwater art installations

https://www.underwatersculpture.com/

Joanne Rappaport, "Cowards Don’t Make History: A Discussion about Participatory Action Research"

November 11, 2020

Joanne Rappaport, "Cowards Don’t Make History: A Discussion about Participatory Action Research"

About this Event

Registration link

How can research serve liberatory and emancipatory ends? In the early 1970s, a group of Colombian intellectuals led by the pioneering sociologist Orlando Fals Borda created a research-activist collective called La Rosca de Investigación y Acción Social (Circle of Research and Social Action) that developed a method of collaboration known as Participatory Action Research. In her recently-published book Cowards Don’t Make History: Orlando Fals Borda and the Origins of Participatory Action Research (Duke University Press, 2020), Joanne Rappaport examines the development of Participatory Action Research on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, where Fals Borda and his colleagues collaborated with the National Peasant Users Association. By coordinating research priorities with peasant leaders, studying the history of peasant struggles and preparing accessible materials for an organizational readership, activist-researchers transformed research into a political organizing tool.

Professor Rappaport’s talk will introduce the participatory methods of knowledge construction developed by Fals Borda and his colleagues in 1970s Colombia, with particular attention to the role that visuality and graphic storytelling played in their work. The presentation will be followed by a discussion of the continuing relevance and potential applications of Participatory Action Research in other contexts, including Charlottesville.

This event is organized by PhD candidates Mathilda Shepard and Matthew Slaats as a part of the IHGC PhD Public Humanities Lab.

Joanne Rappaport is an anthropologist in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University. Professor Rappaport’s research interests include ethnicity, historical anthropology, new social movements, literacy, race, collaborative research methodologies, and Andean ethnography and ethnohistory. She has published four single-authored books, as well as teaching in the Ethnoeducation Program of the Universidad del Cauca (Colombia) and the Community Pedagogy Program of the Autonomous Indigenous Intercultural University sponsored by the Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca (CRIC). She has also collaborated with the Casa del Pensamiento, a research unit of the Asociación de Cabildos Indígenas del Norte del Cauca (ACIN). Professor Rappaport is currently working with Altais Comics on a graphic history based on her study of Fals Borda.

Mellon Fellows Seminar - Ari Blatt, “State of Place, State of Mind: Vernacular Landscapes in Contemporary French Photography”

November 6, 2020

Ari Blatt

Associate Professor

Department of French, University of Virginia

** Seminar:  November 6, 2020: “State of Place, State of Mind:  Vernacular Landscapes in Contemporary French Photography”

Project Summary

Since the mid-1980s, art photographers from metropolitan France have been training their lenses on places throughout the country they call home. Their work constitutes a dynamic, thoughtful, and altogether transformative way of envisioning what on the surface might seem like perfectly mundane locations, but which the photographs endorse as landscapes endowed with the capacity to expand and indeed “scape” our experience and understanding of modern France. My current book project, The Topographic Imaginary: Attending to Place in Contemporary French Photography, introduces readers to a selection of some of the most compelling artists who exemplify this trend. Particularly sensitive to the physiognomic state of the nation today—and to environments both natural and manmade—the pictures they produce depict diverse sectors of terrain from throughout urban, peri-urban, and rural France. They are especially adept at rendering the variegated contours and surface features of some of the nation’s most unheralded and vernacular landscapes more visible than they have ever been before. As they investigate various zones of the real that, under most conditions, would normally elude us, these images contribute to a consistently emerging sense of place and shape our gaze of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century France in exciting new ways. They invest the places they picture with meaning and re-negotiate how the nation has come to be seen. They revisit, challenge, and disorient dominant conceptions associated with the French photographic tradition and the mythologies it has engendered. And they show how contemporary photographers deploy the medium and experiment with its conventions to reimagine a more traditional and time-worn idea of the country’s shared common space.

Biography

Ari Blatt is Associate Professor in the Department of French at UVa. A specialist of modern and contemporary French literature and culture, he is the author of Pictures into Words: Images in Contemporary French Fiction (Nebraska, 2012). Other published or forthcoming work includes articles on television and literature; on manic fiction; on the suspension of movement in cinema; on topographic narrative; on writing about walking; and on looking at (and listening to) trees. He recently co-edited an essay collection entitled France in Flux: Space, Territory, and Contemporary Culture (Liverpool, 2019), and is writing a book on vernacular landscapes in contemporary French photography.

Deborah Baker Fall 2020 Seminar: “Narrative in the Age of Political Extremism” (Part II)

November 2, 2020

For more information, e-mail Bruce Holsinger (bwholsinger@gmail.com)

IHGC Fall Seminar with Deborah Baker

“Narrative in the Age of Political Extremism”

Mondays, 3.00-5.00pm

Dates

October 26

November 2

November 9

November 16

We are living in a time of rising extremism and increasing polarization around the world.  This trend has been accompanied by acts of millenarian terror, generally committed by men who believe themselves and their identities and beliefs to be facing an existential threat.  What narrative strategies can be used to dramatize the conflict between those who want to destroy civil society, replacing civic norms with ones in which they are the unquestioned arbiters, and those who seek to protect the status quo? In this seminar we will look at works of fiction and narrative non-fiction that have captured this struggle in all its moral, political, and historical dimensions.

Reading list:

The Convert by Deborah Baker (narrative non-fiction)

One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway by Asne Sierstad  (narrative non-fiction)

American War by Omar el Akkad (futurist fiction)

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (speculative fiction)

Defying Hitler by Sebastien Haffner (posthumous memoir)

Mellon Fellows Seminar - Allison Bigelow, “Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World”

October 30, 2020

Allison Bigelow

Tom Scully Discovery Chair Associate Professor of Spanish

Department of Spanish, Italian & Portuguese, University of Virginia

** Seminar:  October 30, 2020:  “Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World”

REGISTER HERE

Project Summary

I am beginning a new project at IHGC, one that builds from the methods that I developed in my first book, Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture for the University of North Carolina Press, May 2020). My new project turns from mining to agriculture, another critical vernacular science and a root paradigm of settler colonialism. In what I am tentatively titling Women of Corn, Men of Corn: The Meanings of Maize Agriculture in the Early Americas, I will compare agricultural technologies and the techniques of maize cultivation in two regions of the hemisphere, Mayan-speaking Mesoamerica, where men grew crops, and the Algonquin-speaking Chesapeake, where women took charge of farming. This framework of similarity and difference will allow me to analyze how gender influenced agricultural life, and how agricultural patterns shaped gender systems, before and after the European invasion.

Biography

Allison Bigelow is the Tom Scully Discovery Chair Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. She is the author of Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture for UNC Press, 2020), the first book-length study of the technical and scientific vocabularies that miners developed in early modern Iberian colonies. Her research on Indigenous knowledge production, gender systems, and colonial science has been funded by the NEH, ACLS, and Huntington Library, and it is published in journals like Anuario de estudios bolivianos, Early American Literature, Early American Studies, Ethnohistory, Journal of Extractive Industries and Societies, and PMLA. With Rafael Alvarado (https://datascience.virginia.edu/people/rafael-alvarado) she is the co-PI of the UVA Multepal Project, a scholarly and pedagogical initiative in digital Mesoamerican studies. Multepal's current focus is to prepare digital critical editions of the sacred book of the Maya K'iche', Popol Wuj (https://multepal.github.io/popolwuj/). At IHGC, Allison is beginning a new project, tentatively titled Women of Corn, Men of Corn: The Meanings of Maize Agriculture in the Early Americas, which will compare agricultural technologies in two regions of the Americas: Mesoamerica, where men grew crops, and the Chesapeake, where women took charge of farming.

Amitav Ghosh, “Future or Past? Climate Change as seen from the Global North and South”

October 30, 2020

Amitav Ghosh, “Future or Past? Climate Change as seen from the Global North and South”

Friday October 30, 2020 | 3.00-4.00 pm | Zoom link (no registration required)

In the West, no matter whether in economics, science or indeed, fiction, climate change is almost always imagined in relation to the future.  In the global south the imagining of climate change is markedly different. This talk will examine some of the differences between the two perspectives.

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria and is the author of The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and the three volumes of The Ibis Trilogy; Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire.The Circle of Reason was awarded France’s Prix Médicis in 1990, and The Shadow Lines won two prestigious Indian prizes the same year, the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Ananda Puraskar. The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke award for 1997 and The Glass Palace won the International e-Book Award at the Frankfurt book fair in 2001. In January 2005 The Hungry Tide was awarded the Crossword Book Prize, a major Indian award. His novel, Sea of Poppies (2008) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, 2008 and was awarded the Crossword Book Prize and the India Plaza Golden Quill Award.

Deborah Baker Fall 2020 Seminar: “Narrative in the Age of Political Extremism” (Part I)

October 26, 2020

Register HERE

IHGC Fall Seminar with Deborah Baker

“Narrative in the Age of Political Extremism”

Mondays, 3.00-5.00pm

Dates

October 26

November 2

November 9

November 16

We are living in a time of rising extremism and increasing polarization around the world.  This trend has been accompanied by acts of millenarian terror, generally committed by men who believe themselves and their identities and beliefs to be facing an existential threat.  What narrative strategies can be used to dramatize the conflict between those who want to destroy civil society, replacing civic norms with ones in which they are the unquestioned arbiters, and those who seek to protect the status quo? In this seminar we will look at works of fiction and narrative non-fiction that have captured this struggle in all its moral, political, and historical dimensions.

Reading list:

The Convert by Deborah Baker (narrative non-fiction)

One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway by Asne Sierstad  (narrative non-fiction)

American War by Omar el Akkad (futurist fiction)

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (speculative fiction)

Defying Hitler by Sebastien Haffner (posthumous memoir)

Mellon Fellows Seminar - China Scherz, “Not Me: Addiction, Release, and Response in Central Uganda"

October 16, 2020

Register here. 

China Scherz

Associate Professor

Department of Anthropology, University of Virginia

** Seminar: October 16, 2020: “Higher Powers: Alcohol and After in Uganda's Capital City”

-- Scherz will be joined during her seminar by her Ugandan colleagues on the project:

George Mpanga and Sarah Namirembe, Independent Researchers, Kampala, Uganda.

Project Summary

Higher Powers: Alcohol and After in Uganda’s Capital City is a collaborative monograph (co-authored by George Mpanga and Sarah Namirembe) that draws on four years of fieldwork carried out with Ugandans working to reconstruct their lives after attempting to leave problematic forms of alcohol use behind.  Given the relatively recent introduction of Western ideas of alcoholism and addiction in Uganda, most of these people have used other therapeutic resources including herbal emetic therapies, engagements with lubaale spirits, and forms of deliverance and spiritual warfare practiced in Pentecostal churches.  Entailed in each of these therapeutic forms are understandings of the self that have profound consequences for the forms of life and sociality that can follow an effort to stop drinking. While these therapeutic forms differ from one another in substantial ways, they all present challenges to the prevailing biomedical model of addiction as a chronic relapsing brain disease.  In so doing, Higher Powers moves towards a reconceptualization of addiction and recovery that may prove relevant well beyond Uganda.  Further, in attending to these vernacular therapeutic forms, Higher Powers points to the need to attend more carefully to the place of spiritual experiences in processes of personal transformation and argues for the importance of giving renewed attention to forms of indigenous medical and spiritual practice in the medical anthropology of Africa. 

Biography

China Scherz is an Associate Professor in the department of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. She specializes in medical anthropology, the anthropology of ethics, and the anthropology of religion. Through a diverse range of projects in Ireland, the United States, and Uganda, she has explored: how people decide whom they should care for and how, how these values are instilled, and how they change over time.  Her first book, Having People, Having Heart: Charity, Sustainable Development and Problems of Dependence in Central Uganda (University of Chicago Press, 2014), makes an ethnographically grounded critique of sustainability, cost-effectiveness, and community participation in international development by contrasting these more dominant paradigms with increasingly marginal forms of Catholic charity. China Scherz is currently working on two NSF funded projects on addiction and projects of personal transformation, one in Uganda and another in Southwest Virginia.

IHGC & PEN America - Screening of the Vice-Presidential Debate (with Jamelle Bouie, Sally Hudson, Andra Gillespie, & Deborah McDowell)

October 7, 2020

IHGC & PEN America - Calling in, Calling Out, and What Difference Does It Make?: "Free" Expression in the Academy

September 30, 2020

Mellon Fellows Seminar - Giulia Paoletti, "In its own Image: Beginnings of Photography in Senegal"

September 25, 2020

Giulia Paoletti’s research examines nineteenth and twentieth century African art with a particular focus on the early histories of photography in West Africa. Based on two years of fieldwork, she is working on a book manuscript tracing the origins and early developments of photography in Senegal (1860-1960). The book is based on her dissertation that received the Arts Council of the African Studies Association’s 2017 Roy Sieber Award for Best Dissertation in African art (2013- 6). Besides Senegal, she did research in Mali, Nigeria, Benin, Cameroon and the Gambia where she has examined contemporary art practices.

Humanities Informatics Lab Final Showcase: Network-Corpus

September 25, 2020

Registration link

Emergent/cy Digital Humanities Pedagogy, a Roundtable is the final event of the Network/Corpus working group, led by Brad Pasanek and Rennie Mapp. This event is one of the online panels held in September, 2020, to showcase and conclude the Humanities Informatics Lab hosted by the Institute of the Humanities & Global Culture at UVA. The activities of Network/Corpus, the group most nearly aligned with the field known today as digital humanities (DH), have ranged from workshops on social networks to reading-group discussions on digital textual studies, to visiting lectures on search functions and image recognition in archives, as well as interactive exhibits of the Puzzle Poetry group (with their 3D printed pieces of text). Our final roundtable chose to emphasize pedagogy.

Presenters will briefly speak on courses and curricula relating to big data or DH methods in literature and the arts, crises in humanities higher education, opportunities for cultural critique with and of technology, and other aspects of our collaborative projects. A moderator and respondent will initiate discussion of such matters as emerging conditions of online pedagogy--how is DH pedagogy different from teaching with technology?; the impact of machine learning on studies of texts, persons, and cultures; anti-racist or decolonizing commitments; the many media of writing lives and textual scholarship; and other timely matters. Participants are encouraged but not required to read in advance “The Futures of Digital Humanities Pedagogy in a Time of Crisis,” Brandon Walsh’s short essay (under review), and to explore DH @ UVA and the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities (open to all graduate students enrolled at the University of Virginia) at http://dh.virginia.edu.

Panel:

Rennie Mapp, Project Manager for Strategic DH Initiatives and Co-Leader of the Network-Corpus Research Group: “’Information is Virtual’: The Informatics of Network/Corpus Events”

Brandon Walsh, Head of Student Programs at UVA’s Scholars’ Lab: “Intention and Care: Values, Pedagogy, and DH Community”

Brad Pasanek, Mayo NEH Distinguished Professor of English and Co-Leader of the Network-Corpus Research Group: “NEH Professorship and Puzzle Poetry”

Eleanore Neumann, Doctoral Candidate in Art and Architectural History: “Practicing Decolonial DH Inside and Outside the Classroom”

Alison Booth, Professor of English and Co-Director of the Humanities Informatics Lab: “When Data and Cultural Heritage Are Daily News: Online DH Teaching”

Phil Trella, Associate Vice Provost and Director of the Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs, Moderator

Yitna Firdyiwek, Instructional Designer, Learning Design Technology, Arts & Sciences, Respondent